Author Archives: Merv Adrian

Sportswriters: Keep Olympic Coverage Factual. We Don’t Need Your Uninformed Opinions

Guest post by my colleague and friend, Mark Beyer, whose daughter has participated in figure skating for much of her life. I have seen multiple online articles about how this year was the “worst Olympic finish ever” in Figure Skating. I have a bit of a passion for this sport due to my daughter’s longContinue reading “Sportswriters: Keep Olympic Coverage Factual. We Don’t Need Your Uninformed Opinions”

January 2018 Hadoop Tracker

Last month’s update was obsolete before it published. This often happens because of multiple moving parts and my extended gestation period. I needed to correct entries for both AWS and Hortonworks. The new Tracker is correct as far as I know as of January 2, 2018. Enjoy. –more–

December 2017 Tracker – Where’s Hadoop?

The leading 2017 story of Hadoop distributions is that nobody seems to want to be accused of being in the business of providing them. Some former champions are expanding their shiny new positioning: Cloudera is selling Enterprise Data Hubs and Analytic DBs; Hortonworks offers DataPlanes and Next-Gen Data Platforms; MapR touts the Converged Data Platform. In the cloud world, Amazon’s EMR is at least designed to “run andContinue reading “December 2017 Tracker – Where’s Hadoop?”

The Era of Microsoft on Windows-Only Is Over – OMG

Written by Donald Feinberg and Merv Adrian On 25-Sep-2017 at Ignite, Microsoft announced general availability of SQL Server 2017, now supporting both Windows and Linux platforms, as well as support for containers. It can now book revenue for a product already widely used by early release customers. What does this imply for the $34.4 billion database management system (DBMS) Market? Over theContinue reading “The Era of Microsoft on Windows-Only Is Over – OMG”

IBM Ends Hadoop Distribution, Hortonworks Expands Hybrid Open Source

IBM has followed Intel and EMC/Pivotal in abandoning efforts to make a business of Hadoop distributions, and followed Microsoft in making Hortonworks its supplying partner. At the former Hadoop Summit, now called Dataworks (itself a sign of the shift from Hadoop-centric positioning), IBM announced it will discontinue its IBM Open Platform/BigInsights offering, and will insteadContinue reading “IBM Ends Hadoop Distribution, Hortonworks Expands Hybrid Open Source”

Hadoop Commercial Support Component Tracker – March 2017

Stack expansion has ground to a halt. The last time an Apache project was added to the list of those most supported by leading Hadoop distribution vendors was July 2016, when Kafka joined the other 14 then commonly included. Since then, no broad support for new projects has emerged. The only project that does seem successfulContinue reading “Hadoop Commercial Support Component Tracker – March 2017”

Google Cloud Spanner Enters With a Splash

This post was authored by Rick Greenwald, Merv Adrian and Donald Feinberg Last week, Google launched its internal Cloud Spanner DBMS into a public beta. Claiming to be both strongly consistent (like a relational DBMSs) and horizontally scalable (like NoSQL DBMSs), Cloud Spanner’s internal use has given Google time to exploit unique physical characteristics of itsContinue reading “Google Cloud Spanner Enters With a Splash”

Microsoft Enters 2017 With 45 Offerings in Magic Quadrants

In Q1 2017, as always, we reset this chart – no bold or italic for new entries. As of January 20, no new MQs had yet been published in 2017 featuring Microsoft, so the picture below lays out a new picture for the year ahead. An addition or two late last  year raise the totalContinue reading “Microsoft Enters 2017 With 45 Offerings in Magic Quadrants”